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Raid Expectations

It was the best of raids, it was the worst of raids; it was the strat of wisdom, it was the strat of foolishness; it was the pull of belief, it was the pull of incredulity; it was the heal-y zones of Light, it was the void zones of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way

Ok, so, apologies for the Dickens parody quote and from the wrong book at that (but honestly, Great Expectations was a terrible book). It just seemed appropriate for me. The weekend’s raiding was an emotional roller-coaster for me. Hopefully less so for my raid partners.

First off, we are not Serious Raiders. We are not a “raid guild”, nor is our run an official “guild run”. There are no apps and requirements but conversely Reversion and I have a free hand to manage things. Last week was our first raid at all, so it’s not like we have a bunch of super players who were ready the week after Cataclysm. I’m well aware that we’re weeks behind the world first but darn it, I am proud of my raiders because they try hard, they know their stuff, and they’re really pretty darn good. Gear will come; skill is, I think, there already.

So last week we raided only Friday and while we made a few token boss pulls in Bastion of Twilight, we were mostly there for the trash. Our dps was too low, our tanks’ gear was weak, the healers’ gear was lacking…. but we made the couple pulls and started to learn the basics of the fight. This Friday, we headed in with the determination to do some serious attempts.

First, though, I had to deal with my attendance issues. We’d had one raider tell me he just wasn’t feeling it, and wasn’t going to be raiding. One raider wasn’t levelled yet. One had horrible gear issues. One of my healers had to work until two hours past pull. And the other healer…. declined my invite.

Not a problem. I brought in another druid, Elia who has raided with us on her shaman or druid on occasion. I knew she was a solid player who’d have my back and heck, I’m always looking to expand my “healer bench”. Falahla, one of our two pro mages, got her hunter husband Ado to come along. He is a Serious Raider like we aren’t, but he was taking the week off so nothing kept him from trying boss pulls with us. We pulled in Grom’s paladin, and a warlock who is in the other guild raid (to be specific, the player is in that raid but usually on a different character) and went.

We two-healed the trash without incident. Well, there was the time we accidentally pulled the second patrolling group while we were working on the first. “Everyone out!” Reversion ordered, and we made it…. except for poor Whodowhat the warlock, who had just zoned in and got eaten. Ooops. Elia and I coordinated our Lifeblooms, we used crowd control like the pros we are (if there’s one thing I want to boast about in our raid, it’s our crowd control. Reversion is expert at setting the pulls, our raiders are great at carrying it out and keeping things sheeped/frozen/repented, and as a healer I love that)

So we started making attempts on the boss. We had dragons 1,2, and 5 active, going around from the left; that’s the one that gives the boss an attack speed buff, the one that makes the boss stack a healing debuff on the tanks, and the one that makes the proto-dragon have a Flame Barrage ability. (I think; Reversion will have to correct me if I’m wrong [Rev: I edited it] ) The obvious first one to be released was the one with the attack speed buff. Healers couldn’t handle the tank damage otherwise. Then we’d do the flame barrage one, so that we could see the incoming fire attacks and get out of it.

Well, long story short, the healing was brutal. Just brutal. We could keep either the tanks or the raid up, but not both. Around 9, our missing shammy healer came on and we asked the lowest performing dps to step out. He, being a good guy and knowing that his gear was terrible, graciously agreed and we brought in Chalandrae. That helped a lot.

Then one attempt, we get the second drake down and the healing gets so much easier. Everyone burns the boss. I throw some Wraths, Chalandrae fires off Lightning Bolts – and at 15%, he hits the enrage timer.

So we go back in, set up again, the tanks die. And again. We do some discussing and the healers all agree that the tanks felt squishier the last few attempts. We check their gear. Reversion looks ok – well, now; back at the start of the night, after doing all the trash and our first wipe on the boss, Ado asks in vent why exactly Reversion is wearing his fishing pole. Ooops. Logarithm’s gear has some pieces that are more dps-y than tank-y, and he definitely took more damage than Reversion. We decide that the good attempt, they just somehow used all their cooldowns perfectly and that’s so hard to replicate with our skill level (Rev: We do pretty well with cooldowns all the time but that first phase, if you have just one dragon out, is a real healing race with what the tanks take and what the raid is getting from the fire balls. That one try it just happned that what was falling from the sky, what the healers were casting, and what the tanks were poping, all dovetailed perfectly.) But it’s quitting time anyway, so off we go.

Now, during the raid I determined that I had made a serious error. I had forgotten to put Saturday’s raid on the calendar, and some of my raiders thought we were only going Friday. I had to talk to a few and assure them that we were indeed going Saturday and please not to go with a different group that was rumored to be going. But all day Saturday I was nervous. We were already having attendance issues and now….

Saturday afternoon I whispered with the healer who had declined our invite, asking him what was up, since I’d seen him online when we were. He said he didn’t think we were geared enough to down bosses; I said that we knew we had some weak slots, and one guy whose gear wasn’t that great and we asked to step out when we had a viable replacement and an obvious need for a stronger raider. He clarified that he meant tanks and healers needed “all 346 and one or two purples”.

Ok, I got mad. If you Wow-Heroes’d me (apparently a favorite of some guildies) you’d see I have a 316 trinket, because I haven’t got the heroic version of it yet and I prefer it’s spirit proc to any of the higher ilvl trinkets that I have. And 333 bracers because, darn it, there’s two pairs of heroic leather bracers out there and I can’t get either to drop. But I had just the night before gotten an epic staff from Bastion trash (it’s so cool; it looks like a Twilight Hammer symbol!) , we were gemmed, enchanted, and darn it we’d hit the enrage timer at 15% to go the night before. Which I pointed out.

Well, we got back after church and the other raid had started – but my core raiders were waiting for us in vent. I got us; seven of us. I added whodowhat, and then…. we needed another healer and a dps. Elia hadn’t come online, but Chalandrae had so I had a shammy healer, but after last night I knew we needed three.

Karius started asking around, and found us some people from her old guild; Squishi the feral druid, and Jhudara the shammy. So we were set. Two shammy healers and a tree sounded good to me!

We went and started making attempts, refining our strategy all night. Finally we settled on three tanking it – Squishi turned out to be a great bear as well as a cat – and releasing two drakes at once, burning them down, then killing the boss. It started being obvious that we could survive into the boss-burn stage with this. Once the healers OOMed and we wiped; I asked the shammies to drop their mana tide totems in a defined order and to call out when they were doing it, and that helped.

By the end of the night we were reliably into the final phase and hitting the enrage timer with 12% or less to go. Our best try was 9%. We discussed trying to two heal, or find a way to get more dps, but we came up against the end of the raid.

Now, this is why I titled my post “raid expectations”. That just seemed the theme of the whole weekend. That raider who didn’t think we were geared enough? The raid he went to didn’t do as well on the same boss; by 10 pm Saturday he’d rsvp’d for next week’s raid. Elia, who heals for the other guild raid, mentioned how much she enjoyed our expert crowd control usage. We’ve been having a discussion with some guildies who just don’t see CC as that important. It’s really funny but those guildies are invariably NOT healers.

Jhudora, the pugged in shaman, kept whispering me about how much she liked our raid for keeping Vent fairly business like and not having vulgarity and mean-ness in our raid chat. I admit, I was sort of taken aback, but then I remembered that that’s one reasonwhy I decided we should run our own raid; because that crude “humor” annoys me so much. I find a lot of women who run with us really enjoy the non-sexist, non-crude, affirming atmosphere. We often has 5 or 6 female players in our raid.

Well, I invited Jhudora to come with us next week too and hopefully she will – she’s exactly the sort of healer I want.

I did decide that the guildie who said we weren’t geared enough has a point (Rev: A small one. An average of one upgraded item per person and we likely would have had the boss down. The raid that person bailed on us to go to wiped hard and broke up early), and this week I WILL get exalted with Wildhammer for a couple epics there, we WILL upgrade some of Reversion’s gear, and we WILL work with our raiders to see a few upgrades, make sure they are enchanted, grind mats for flasks and feasts (we ran out halfway through Saturday night) and hit things really hard this weekend. I want Halfus to come down; then we’ll decide whether to push on or to visit Magmaw or Omnitron.

This already is a wall of text so I’ll save my discussion of what I want in and from my healing team for later this week. Until then, I’ll just note that this week I have 13 invites out on my raid invites – and 8 confirmed, 4 tentatives.

Oh, and does anyone know a good addon for doing calendar invites and stuff? I want to be able to do Fri and Saturday’s invites at the same time without the hassle…

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13 Responses

A raid team is just that, a team. As a member of said team, each raider holds a personal responsibility to show up and grind through the early pulls and wipes along with everyone else. Not willing to deal with the learning and repair bills? Fine. Find another raid group. We don’t need people who aren’t team players.

I think the problem is that Crits has had very much a culture of “show up to whatever’s fun”. Which is fine; that’s what is advertised. That’s why Reversion and I haven’t at all tried to make this any kind of “official GUILD run”, just a “regular raid”. I fear it’s “Analogue and Reversion’s raid” where I don’t really want it to be (I hate cliques) but at the same time, that lets us be hard nose types and say, no, you’re not reliable, or you don’t have enchants, or even no, we have too many melee tonight, we need ranged.

I am going to write a post this week about my heal team especially…. hahahaha…. I have to find a way to tone it down because in my brain it’s so sexist right now.

I really dislike when people base the ability of a raid group to down something soley on gear. I know that gear does factor into having enough dps/heals/survivability, but I’ve seen 100% geared out players who are just not good players and die 10 seconds into the fight because they don’t move out of stuff. All the gear in the world doesn’t cure stupidity- so yeah- boo to whomever made that statement!

Well, it was someone who went to a raid that *didn’t* get Halfus to 9% at the enrage timer, so…. there’s that.

I would rather have raid-aware people who know their rotations in 346 blues than stupid people wearing nothing but purple. Any day. And I’d rather take someone in half greens who treats the other raiders like human beings, than someone wearing more gear who puts other people down.

Glad to see you got farther along on that drake combo. Based on the drake abilities thats either the hardest or second hardest in my opinion. (Having the Storm drake instead of the Timewarden requires interupts on the boss which lowers DPS on the Nether drake, with most raid comps.)

I went in there last night in a thrown together guild group that had bear and pally tanks and tree, shammy, and pally heals. We got him down pretty quick with the pally tanking Halfus and bubbling at 12-14 stacks and retaunting. This let us go on to the Timewarden with a tank that only had a few MS debuffs and a fresh tank on the boss. From there its just a DPS race with tank swaps. Not standing in the fire should be a given for raiders.

We tried various combinations of 2-3 tanking (pulling up two bosses at once or not), 2-3 healing, moving the heroism to either the front (to get past the hardest part) or the back (when we had the most bonus). We even tried downing 3 dragons. That time was 17%. We proved the bonus is not multiplicative so there is no point in doing 3. That also let us see that the ’12 second stun on the boss’ while nice was not actually of benefit.

We had to try everything to see if we could squeeze out more DPS.

We simply needed a higher average dps. Swapping out our lowest one helped, but not enough. Swapping the second lowest might have gotten us closer but we had no super heavy hitter hand. Plus the lowest two were our paladins. We were doing the HoP trick to clear stacks. It worked quite well. I called for one when mine were at 14ish on the first phase and then cleared it with a macro. Then we tank swapped when the first add was down and that put me on the second add with just 4 stacks.

So our best attempts were more or less identical strats so what yall were using. We had him in the teens or below 4 or five times.

I am looking forward to seeing what the new combo of drakes is. I will have to sneak in there again tomorrow and check it out. Having seen two different combinations now and learned enough about 3 of the adds I feel we have a great chance of learning a new set from scratch and then getting him down.
If everyone in the raid goes out and gets one or two upgraded items we will likely get him down.

Jeez! I hate bieng one of the too many melee. Too bad I don’t know how to do anything else 😦 But I had a lot of fun wiping and learning with this group. Way more fun than I’ve had in the longest time before, or to be honest, since. I’m working all the dailies I can find, and have spent hideous amounts of gold to get to the point where I can actually craft useable stuff. But now I’m stuck needing (for now) 1 Chaos Orb to make an upgrade for myself… And I couldn’t get anyone to do a heroic with last night or so far today, so it’s not coming anytime soon. Just remember, whenever you need a super-secret-invisible-ret-killer-pally, just ask.

I hear ya. I badly need a new weapon but lack lots of orbs to make it. I just need to get a good drop but it has not happened yet. That HoP work was great and really smoothed things out. Dropping both of you pallies would have hurt but we might get stuck in that boat next week. Hope not though but it is likely.

My only request would be to know if I’m in or out by Wednesday. You two are lucky… Your spouse plays with you. If I’m going to schedule it and make the at home concessions, i need to know that it’s going to happen.

We are thinking we might start up a short, informal, attendance optional, raid meeting on wednesdays or tuesdays. Just something to talk about how the gearing is coming, who is going to make it, what the plan is… That sort of thing. Hopefully that sort of thing would let us regularly have a final roster by then.

“Jhudora, the pugged in shaman, kept whispering me about how much she liked our raid for keeping Vent fairly business like and not having vulgarity and mean-ness in our raid chat. I admit, I was sort of taken aback, but then I remembered that that’s one reason why I decided we should run our own raid; because that crude “humor” annoys me so much. I find a lot of women who run with us really enjoy the non-sexist, non-crude, affirming atmosphere. We often has 5 or 6 female players in our raid.”
Surprise, surprise, we have something else in common.

I’ve led too many casual and not-so-casual raids in my days and from my perspective, this is a very good start.

The guildies who attended stayed for the duration (except the one who stepped out for the third healer) and appear to be wanting to continue next week, despite the apparent lack of success.

A pugger, after hours of wiping, wants to be invited again because she liked the way the raid was conducted.

Different strategies were used and everyone (from your post) seemed willing to try different approaches.

Do yourself a favor and base early success or failure on how much you progressed as a group, not the number of boss kills. It seems to me the group came together to a certain extent and that’s usually a very good sign of things to come.

About the player who did not come because he felt tanks and healers were not geared enough. I am sorry to say but my experience tells me this type of player will only show up when the perceived odds are in his favors. A flight risk in my opinion.

It’s kind of funny… I thought the point of that raid weekend was to get a look at it, judge our gear, judge our awareness, and to work on building a team. I figured that if a boss went down, it would be an added extra.